“It knows,” Regine says. “It knows it’s won.”
“It hasn’t won,” Seth says. “Not yet.”
But even he doesn’t really believe that.
He feels something at his hand. He looks down. Regine has taken it in her own. She squeezes it, tight.
He squeezes back.
The Driver is halfway down the wide central aisle now, the black screen of its helmet focused purely on them. Seth knows, somehow, that it’s not going to let him get away. Not this time. It won’t stop no matter what he does to any of the coffins. It will come to him first and it will run faster than him and it will be stronger than him and there will be nothing he can do to stop it.
But he’ll try. He’ll try anyway.
“Is Tommy safe?” Regine asks quietly.
“He ran off. Said he might have an idea.”
“So he’s bound to come in for a last-minute rescue, huh?”
Seth can’t help but grin crazily back at her. “If this was all a story my brain was putting together, yeah. That’s exactly how this would end.”
“For the first time ever, I’m hoping you might be right about that.”
The Driver has reached the end of their row. It stops once more, seeming to savor how trapped they are.
Seth grips Regine’s hand even harder. “We’ll fight,” he says. “All the way to the end.”
Regine nods at him. “Until the end.”
The Driver makes a snapping motion with its hand. The baton doubles in length, the sparks and lights flashing from it even more dangerously.
Seth plants his feet, ready to fight.
“Seth?” Regine says.
He looks at her. “What?”
But he never hears what she says –
Because a whining sound fills the room, low at first, but increasing –
The Driver hears, too, turning toward the passageway that extends deeper into farther rooms –
Where the sound is coming from –
Swiftly growing louder –
They see the Driver make to run –
But not fast enough –
As the black van flies out of the deeper passageway, slamming into the Driver at extraordinary speed, so fast one of its legs is knocked right off its body. The van pushes it down the wide central aisle, not stopping until it smashes into a far wall, trapping the Driver against it.
The Driver struggles for a moment longer. The van’s wheels spin fruitlessly against the concrete floor, sending up spirals of smoke, crushing the Driver into the wall.
And then it collapses across the hood of the van, dropping the baton, which goes clattering across the floor.
The Driver lies still.
The wheels of the van slowly stop turning.
Seth and Regine watch, dumbfounded, as a small figure climbs out the still-broken door.
“Is everyone all right?” Tomasz asks.
Part IV
70
Tomasz throws his still-bandaged hands around Regine’s waist and embraces her like he might never let her go. “I am glad,” he says. “Oh, how I am glad.”
“I’m glad, too,” Regine says, pressing her face against his wild, wild hair.
Seth watches, still stunned, as Tomasz disentangles himself from her, then hugs Seth so hard it squeezes the breath out of him. “And you! You said we would save her and we did!”
“You did it mostly,” Seth says, looking back across the rows of coffins at the crashed van, at the motionless Driver still hunched across its hood. “Right in the nick of time.” He looks back at them both. “Again.”
Tomasz glances at Regine. “He is back to believing we are made up.”
“He may have a point,” Regine says. “How the hell did you manage to find the van and then drive it underground?”
“Was not the hell hard,” Tomasz says. “We thought it was parked around the prison somewhere. It was only matter of finding it.”
“And getting it started,” Seth says. “And driving it –”
“Well, okay, so a few weird things happen when I do find it, I confess,” Tomasz says. “The door is still off and I sit down in it and it starts automatically. I do nothing and it just starts. And then screens start lighting up, asking me questions I do not understand – and not because of language barrier but because they do not make sense. Numbers that mean nothing, camera views of huge rooms with all these coffins –”
“Yeah,” Seth says. “I’ve seen those.”
“And then there is this blinking box that says NAVIGATE TO DISTURBANCE? Like that, like a question, so I figure DISTURBANCE can only be you and so I say, yes, pressing box to NAVIGATE and then car just takes off! I am nearly falling out while it speeds away.” Tomasz mimes the turns with his body, this way and that. “And we zoom through the burnt-out neighborhood until we get to big underground carpark entrance and before I know it, we are driving down and down and down.”
He holds out his hands as if to say the rest is self-evident. “And here I am, in these rooms. And there is the Driver, standing in the middle of the path, and I take the steering so the van cannot steer away and I have to lean down to press my foot on the drive faster pedal and then bang, it is hit.” He claps his hands to make the bang. “And then we hit the wall.” He rubs the top of his head. “Which was hurtful.”
“You did great,” Regine says.
“Yeah,” Seth agrees. “More than great.”
Incredibly great, he thinks. Suspiciously great.
But then again, unlikely didn’t always mean impossible –
“I don’t suppose anyone’s seen my shirt,” Regine says.
“Here,” Tomasz says, squatting down behind the coffin and grabbing a bundle of cloths. “It is much torn up. I am sorry.”
“Never much liked it anyway,” Regine says, wrapping the remnants around her.
“And you are okay?” Tomasz asks her.
She’s silent for a moment and Seth thinks she won’t want to talk about it, but then she says, “Seth saw it. Seth saw my death.”
Tomasz turns to him, eyes wide. “Just like you saw mine.”
“Lucky me,” Seth mumbles.
“I could feel you there,” Regine says.
“You could?” Seth asks, surprised.
“Yes!” Tomasz says. “I knew you were there, too. I could feel you with me as I lived mine.”
“And somehow,” Regine continues, “just knowing you were there was kind of enough, in a way.” She rubs her eyes wearily with the palms of her hands. “I don’t know how to explain it. It was awful. Seeing that bastard again. Having to live it again.” She looks at Seth. “But then I knew you were there. And I knew . . . I guess I just knew that someone remembered who I was.”